Members of Parliament for non-resident citizens

Parliamentary democracy is based on territorial representation: Members of Parliament are elected to represent citizens who reside within certain geographically-defined electoral districts (called ‘ridings’ in Canada).

One problem with this system concerns the representation of citizens who reside abroad. Insofar as such persons remain citizens of the country in question—the state remains the ultimate protector of such citizens’ rights and interests; it is the one place that they can go to if denied residency elsewhere—it would seem that they should have some kind of representation in their country’s legislature.

Many countries allow non-resident citizens to continue to vote within the electoral districts wherein they last resided, at least for a certain period of time (currently, Canadians can vote in federal elections so long as they have not resided abroad for more than five years). But a better form of representation, I think, would be to allocate a certain number of MPs to represent directly non-resident citizens.

Or so I have proposed in the past—viz., that there should be a number of MPs within the Canadian federal Parliament to represent Canadians abroad. (Such forms of representation, it should be noted, already exist for French and Italian citizens.) Interesting, a Briton residing in Spain recently has made a very similar proposal, and has started a petition to get the proposal debated within the UK Parliament. I wish him luck!

The end of ‘New Labour’ in Britain

In what looks like the end of ‘New Labour’ – the ‘centrist’ or ‘Third Way’ form of Labour championed by Tony Blair and his fellow travellers, which positioned the party closer to the ‘political centre’ of British politics following the Thatcher era (the ‘centre,’ or course, having been moved dramatically rightward by the policies and ideology of Thatcher and her minions throughout the 1980s) – Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the British Labour Party.  (For readers unfamiliar with British politics, Vox has a pretty decent overview of Corbyn.)

Whether this leftward lurch means the end of Labour as a major party within the United Kingdom, or the revitalization of Labour, especially given Corbyn’s strong rejection of the Conservatives’ (economically self-destructive) austerity spending cuts, I do not know.  I certainly hope that the latter is the case, despite my disagreement with a number of Corbyn’s foreign policy views (many of which, such as the withdrawal of Britain from NATO, I suspect will be downplayed and/or revised significantly in the coming years).

And what was the alternative for Labour?  Another ‘Tory lite’ New Labour leader?  Labour failed in Scotland in the last election in large part (if not mainly) because the Scottish National Party ran to Labour’s left, especially in opposing further austerity.  Although I don’t follow British politics as closely as Canadian or American politics these days, I’m sceptical that another New Labour candidate would be in any better position to challenge the Tories in the next election.  Given a choice between ‘death in glory, or death in boredom,’ then, it makes sense for Labour to opt for the latter.  But perhaps, just perhaps, glory without death might be achievable...